From the archive, 14 December 1966: Anthony Burgess, the cantankerous old man

Anthony Burgess at home in 1968. Photograph: Marvin Lichtner/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

I had always expected middle-age to bring calm, indifference, tolerance, a quiescence of the passions, a cooling sorbet before the final great Yeatsian rage of lust (by courtesy of Steinach) for girls in mini-skirts, or the nylon-rending of the tricyclical Betjeman beast. I have not found it like that at all. I get mad very quickly and violently, usually about matters of no consequence. If I go out to lunch with somebody and, after the main course, the waiter says "Cheese board, zhentilmen?" I can hardly see my glass of claret for blood. I hiss that I can get cheese and biscuits in any supermarket; what I want now is some hot, sweet, frothy subtlety that is a justification of those elaborate kitchens and temperamental chefs. My rage frightens me if not the waiter.

This disproportion between the emotion and its cause is supposed to be a mark of immaturity. Am I then retrogressing ? There was a time when I'd gladly accept a bit of hard tack and a heel of New Zealand Cheddar from the waiter and be grateful that he deigned to serve me at all. Was I maturer then? That was the time, too, for being generously angry - angry not on my own behalf, but on behalf of big human causes. Now it's all what Blake called "minute particulars," and they're all personal.

The telephone rang the other morning when I was alone in the house and, collating certain scholarly references, had fingers stuck between the pages of various books. I took my fingers out, and went to answer the ringing. It was a wrong number. I would not normally have done more than curse: my number was once that of Chiswick Polytechnic, and I am frequently ordered by callers to put them through immediately to the Typewriting Department; occasionally, when I say I can't, I am accused of colour prejudice and threatened under the appropriate Act of Parliament.

But on this occasion it was all typewriters at the other end, but also festive laughter and glass-chinking, as though some shady tax evasion scheme had worked out well. When I said: "Sorry, wrong number," a Scots voice replied: "That's all right, laddie, you're forgiven." My passion was intense, and cruelly and destructively directed at the poor neutral telephone.

The other rot gets worse every year - the rotting away of simple courtesy I mean. Christmas shopping in London is appalling. Go up or down the escalator in Selfridges, and a recorded voice tells you peremptorily to keep to the right or left: no "please," no "thank you" - incredible when you consider that the wording of this directive had to be worked out beforehand. Outside in Oxford Street a policeman with a loud hailer orders you about. On the Tubes "mind the doors" and "all change" are unqualified by even minimal politeness.And then there are the ill-mannered brats of the television commercials, ordering their mothers to pass the gravy. But it's no good smashing the screen.

To a New York taxi-driver I said: "Riverside Drive, please." He said: "Thank you." Then he added: "For saying 'please '." Then, as I was early for my appointment, he took me to a Broadway dive and bought me beer, giving me cachous after "so she won't smell it on your breath, bud." Courtesy needn't be just its own reward. It may well have place in a utilitarian society.

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